Belle Wong: writer, reader, creativity junkie

Do You Know What This Is Called?

There’s one benefit about being in this community of book lovers and writers – when I get stumped by a language question, I know where to turn!

I need to know what a phrase like “figment of the imagination” is called.

It’s not a cliché, I know, but is there a word(s) that describes such a phrase?

And, for all you book lovers out there, would anyone know if there’s a book out there that collects all these kinds of phrases, a compendium of sorts?

Update: Thanks to comments so far and Twitter, I think I might be looking for collections of idioms, colloquialisms or figures of speech. Your suggestions on any good books that are collections of any of these would be very much appreciated!

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I'm a writer, avid reader, artist-at-heart & book indexer. I blog about writing, books, art, creativity, spirituality, & the power of the imagination. Oh, and I like to write stuff about life in general, too!

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." - Stephen King

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The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.

“I didn’t write my books for posterity (not that posterity would have cared): I wrote them for myself. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t hunger for readers and fame. I never could have endured so much hard, solitary labor without the prospect of an audience. But this graveyard of dead books doesn’t unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had — the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know. ” James Atlas

“It’s the simple, inspiring idea that when members of different groups — even groups that historically dislike one another — interact in meaningful ways, trust and compassion bloom naturally as a result, and prejudice falls by the wayside.”

“We need to understand how refugees are different so that we don’t erase the specificity of their experience.”

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